Seed canary grass

Phalaris canariensis is a tufted annual grass of the Poaceae family, growing 30 to 100 centimetres tall, with erect, smooth, hollow culms arising from a fibrous root system and bearing two to five nodes. The flat, glabrous leaf blades are 5 to 25 centimetres long and 3 to 12 millimetres wide, with a prominent, blunt, membranous ligule 4 to 8 millimetres long and smooth, open sheaths. The compact, ovoid to oblong panicle is dense and head-like, 1.5 to 6 centimetres long and 1 to 2 centimetres wide, pale green when young and becoming straw-coloured at maturity, the spikelets crowded and laterally flattened. Each spikelet contains a single fertile floret subtended by two broad, whitish, green-striped glumes about 7 to 9 millimetres long with a winged keel, enclosing a smooth, shiny, pale yellow to brown caryopsis (the familiar canary seed). Native to the western Mediterranean basin, it is now grown commercially and naturalised in temperate regions worldwide as a weed of arable land and disturbed ground.